City Of God 15

I am going to provide you here, Gentle Reader, with a concise CV. A friend recently suggested to me that even if I claim to have never benefited from white privilege, surely by default I must have benefited in some way by being Caucasian in Canada. For example, I must have been hired for employment instead of a person of colour, or been rented an apartment for being white, thus displacing other, equally worthy or worthier candidates solely because of my skin colour. Just to be polite I simply agreed that that might be a possibility though I didn't feel persuaded. Now, my friend and I have certain things in common: we are the same age and we are both white Canadian males. Our upbringings have been particularly different and I have never enjoyed any of my friend's privileges or advantages. I was also hugely impacted by chronic sexual, physical and emotional abuse by family members throughout my childhood, as well as my father's alcoholism and my parents' divorce when I was thirteen and subsequent very selfish choices that left me without any support or stability so that by the time I was eighteen I had to live on my own and survive on low-paying work with some runs of employment insurance and welfare, since I often had a difficult time persuading employers to hire me and this constant struggle to survive made it impossible for me to complete my post-secondary education. I was also both queer and a super-devout Christian (still am!) I have never in my life earned anything near a living wage. All the jobs that I have had have also put me in workplaces and environments that were racially diverse, allowing me firsthand to share with people of colour the kind of social and economic marginalization that no one seems to believe anymore can also be part of the purview of anybody, regardless of their skin colour. Only in the past sixteen years of BC Housing have I lived in safe and secure housing. I have been homeless (for ten and a half months between 1998 and 1999). In the workplace, often my supervisors have been people of colour. Sometimes I was the only white person, or almost the only one working there. I have never in my work history felt that preference was being given to me based on race. Likewise with my housing experience. Most of my landlords have been persons of colour. In most of my living arrangements there has been diversity, especially more recently, and now in the building where I live, the majority of the tenants represent visible minorities. I am writing this because I am frankly sick and tired of the way people use identity politics as a brush to paint everyone in the same broad strokes of black and white. And there is so much anger and emotion fueling the justified outrage of many persons of colour that it is probably going to be nearly impossible to have a rational conversation about this with anyone for a long time to come. Do I believe that white privilege exists, then? Of course it exists. But it is also tied in with economic and social status. Especially as people of aboriginal and African heritages become more empowered, they are also going to be more angry, and anger can be a very blinding as well as a motivating force. Not all people of colour have this anger and I have been blessed with knowing and working and being befriended by a lot of decent and lovely people of African, South Asian, Asian and Latino heritage. Neither do all white people share in white privilege, and often for reasons I have just stated. We are, each one of us, more than our categories. In the City of God we don't see categories. We see persons. We recognize and respect the influence and impact and influence that our racial and ethnic heritage has had, how it has shaped us, and how it has been used against us. But if we are living in the City of Love, which is the true identity of the City of God, then we become more focussed on the person, less on the categories and the identity politics and move towards a dynamic of mutual servanthood, which also means hearing and learning from one another's stories of all our life experiences, struggles, failures and triumphs. But we have to get beyond thinking in categories which is really for the intellectually lazy, and learn how to think and see things more clearly. The current talk about white privilege and historic oppression and racial profiling are useful as a model, but fall short as a narrative. Like all models this is going to be flawed, and the human being is far more complex and far more nuanced than this.